Tuesday, November 22, 2011

Behind the Woo

One of my favorite TV shows is “How I Met Your Mother” which may surprise folks close to me as it doesn’t involve guns, cops, or gratuitous shots of men without their shirts on.

Still, I love it.

Now, a couple of years ago HIMYM (as the cool kids call it) aired “Woo Girls” an episode I didn’t love, though looking back that could be because it cut a little too close to home. As I am not a HIMYM blogger, I will just refer you to this synopsis in case you have no idea what I am talking about.

So the other night, I am out with friends at the Airborne Toxic Event concert and I came across what can only be described as Woo Dudes.

Now, I will concede that if one is to woo, a concert seems a perfectly apropos place to do so. I will even admit to wooing some while I was there. However, even at a concert, there is a time and a place to woo. At the end of a song, for example, or the end of a guitar or drum solo, or after the lead singer comments on how hard rockin’ Philadelphia is.

I don’t expect woos in the middle of a song.

But these dudes wooed then. They wooed in the beginning, in the middle, and at the end of songs. They wooed when one of them brought beers. They wooed when one came back from the bathroom. They were wooing fools.

And it wasn’t just wooing. They also fist-bumped (when will this die?) and air guitared and air drummed and high-fived and double high-fived the night away.

But like the Woo Girls from HIMYM, the Woo Dudes woos didn’t ring true. Maybe it was their neatly pressed, Brooks Brothers button downs tucked into their designer jeans, maybe it was the overzealous air drumming, maybe it was that they kept buying me and my friends beer but didn’t once try to actually talk to us (didn’t even stand near us). The Woo Dudes seemed to be performing (and wooing) not from the heart, but for the benefit of their friends.

As I watched the Woo Dudes it came to me. While the Woo Girls were masking their loneliness with their woos, I felt like the Woo Dudes were using their woos to hide their fear: Fear that they were getting old.

Now, I didn’t have the benefit of subtitles, but if I did, I bet they would have read something like, “I would rather be home reading my daughter a bedtime story.”

Or, “It is really loud right here next to this speaker.”

Or, “I hope they hurry up and play Sometime Around Midnight. I have an early meeting tomorrow morning.”

Or simply, “I’m tired and I want to go home.”

But because they either haven’t figured out that growing up isn’t the same as growing old and neither is a bad thing, or they weren’t sure their friends would understand, they wooed.

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